24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Open up the floodgates, freedom reigns supreme, March 2, 2004
Volume 2 of Marcel Proust's 4000+ page masterpiece, "In Search of Lost Time", is, if it's possible, an even greater book than the first volume. I read Volume 1, "Swann's Way", with the kind of astonishment and joy generally reserved for Tolstoy and Maugham, constantly amazed at Proust's (via Moncrieff, Kilmartin, & Enright) ability to deepen sensation and memory to almost religious proportions, and when I finished I thought, "There's no way he can keep this level of beauty up for another 5 volumes." Judging from Volume 2, I was dead wrong.
Proust published "Swann's Way" in 1913, and waited 6 years to publish Volume 2, "Within a Budding Grove"; I presume that in the interim he reorganized his ideas, deciding to expand his novel and explore his themes in greater detail. This volume is much more leisurely and intricately paced than the first, as Proust masterfully tells us of the end of his relationship with Gilberte, his relocation to Balbec, and the beginning of his relationship with Albertine. The slow dying of love, the vaguely confusing experience of a new dwelling as it gradually becomes a home, watching beautiful young girls (the "budding grove" of the title) enjoying their beauty and youth as they walk down a city street...these things and more are plumbed and ruminated upon, with Proust's typically intricate and gorgeous language.
These books, if the first two are any guide, are like nothing ever attempted in the history of literature. Rather than dealing with WHAT happened, Proust settles himself in for the long haul to try and understand WHY it happened; to quote Christopher Hitchens, Proust "exposes and clarifies the springs of human motivation...with a transparency unexampled except in Shakespeare or George Eliot." But I don't think Bill nor George ever dug this deep; Marcel Proust is absolutely one of a kind, and he's not easy to read in this world of flash-images and expressways. He takes his time. Though he was dying with every labored breath (he didn't live to see the entire novel published), Proust was in no hurry to finish. His thoughts, like his sentences, have multiple branches. Follow them and you'll cherish the experience like it was your own.
Moving on to Volume 3.....
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31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, November 3, 2004
This review is from: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (Hardcover)
For the second book of Proust's masterpiece, 'In Search of Lost Time', his attention turns away from the black and white realities of childhood to the greyer realms of adolescence, and with that, the deep, burning sensation of unrequited love. In essence, the second book is a 530-page essay on the different forms of young love, from deep obsession to airy neglect, from the savage loneliness of rejection to the dizzying heights of a love returned.
The book is split into two rough sections, the first of which is called 'At Mme Swan's'. Here we are introduced to Gilberte, Proust's first great love. The feelings he harbour's for her are ridiculously exaggerated, and oh so reminiscent of most people's teenage years. Every action, every word, every glance is analysed, studied, explored for meaning and intent. If, one day, Gilberte invites him to tea, the implications and potential meanings behind the invitation are debated internally for pages. If not, then even more pages are spent examining the pit of despair that Proust' soul fall in to. On top of this unhealthily obsessive love, we have his infatuation with Mme Swan, Gilberte's mother. There is almost a sense that Proust loves Gilberte because she is his age and he 'should' love her, whereas his affection towards Odette Swan is more real because there is no obligation or pressure from anyone, but less likely because she is twenty years older than him, and married.
When Proust's love for Gilberte is over - as it inevitably must, in those tender years of a boy or girl's life - the terrifying lows to which his emotions descend is as remarkable as the highs of his spirit not twenty pages previous. He obsessively analyses the ways in which he will get revenge, plotting to make her love him again, just so that he can reject her, to let her know how it feels. He tortures himself emotionally, visiting Mme Swan and purposely avoiding Gilberte.
What we have in this first part is a fascinating study on the tormented, melodramatic loves of early adolescence. Proust is too young at this stage to understand that love may not be forever, and can speak only in grandiose, exaggerated terms. If not for the fact that the prose is written with such grace and intelligence, his despair would come across as teenage angst at its very blackest.
In the second part of the novel, 'Place-Names: The Place', Proust and his grandmother retire to the beach to aid in the recuperation of his body and mind. Always a frail child, the rigours of new love have taken their toll on the young man. He rejects love, deciding that he shall become a writer once more, a passion that he had denied himself when his love for Gilberte had seemed so real and assured. He is introduced to a variety of characters which, we are told during the narrative, will come to play a great part in his later life: Robert de Saint-Loup, the Baron de Charlus and of course Albertine.
It is in this second section that Proust falls under the shadows of young girls in flower. He meets a group of girls, a 'gang' he calls them, and befriends first one, then all of them, reasoning that out of four or five girls, at least one would be worthy of love. Keeping with the true spirit of adolescence, he falls in and out of love with them all, needing only a stray glance or a casual smile to move from one girl to the other. Only two of them, Albertine and Andree, seem to return his emotions, and even then, everything remains chaste.
Interspersed throughout, we have long, insightful remarks on what love can do to the body, to the mind, and to the relationships we have with other people. Speaking as a male recently finished with his teenage years, I can say that Proust has captured the depth of feeling, the obsessiveness, the surety that everything in the universe will be perfect if only the love is returned, the electric thrill of acceptance, the deep darkness of rejection with such skill that perfection is a word that springs to mind.
Other topics are touched on throughout the novel. Early on, Proust is introduced to an author he holds in high esteem, one Bergotte. He is crushed upon discovering that the man does not exactly coincide with the image he had created while reading Bergotte's books, and ruminates on the fact that a man need not display the same intelligence and wit in reality as he does on the page. We must all focus our attention on achieving either a great reality or a great fiction, for Bergotte, his attentions were focused upon the fiction, and his personality and demeanour when interacting with flesh and blood people suffer. For Proust, it is an introduction to the idea that people can have two - or more - identities, and that a certain one is presented to a certain group of people.
The writing is, of course, typical Proust. Sentences are long, paragraphs are longer, and not very much happens. Dialogue is scarce, action scarcer. The reader is there to observe Proust's thoughts, not to use him as a mirror to the world he inhabits. Luckily for us, Proust's thoughts are never dull or boring. He says early on in the novel, 'For genius lies in reflective power and not in the intrinsic quality of the scene reflected', and Proust's reflective power more than reveal the truth of this maxim.
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
These new translations are a joy to read!, May 14, 2005
This review is from: In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower (Hardcover)
Penguin's new translations of "In Search of Lost Time" were just the nudge I needed to read Proust's masterwork again. I was particularly impressed by the job the American writer Lydia Davis did with "Swann's Way". By contrast, I have a few complaints about James Grieves's rendering of "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower". Where Scott Moncrieff translated "petite bande" (of girls) with the expected "little band," Grieves uses "little gang," which to an American ear sounds rather tough. He mangles one of my favorite quotations. And there's a typo on the bottom of page 95: "not" instead of "now"!
Overall, though, I like the liberties Grieves takes with the text, and we were certainly overdue for a freshened-up translation of one of the most important books of the 20th century. Unlike Proust's French, Scott Moncrieff's English has come to seem dusty and overblown. (For example, he rendered the title of this volume as "Within a Budding Grove", the literal translation being too racy for his 1920s audience of post-Victorians.)
The American edition (from Viking) is particularly handsome. The four volumes now available are uniform in appearance when it comes to their cloth covers (grey and black with silver lettering), and the dust-jackets, though following a general theme, are distinctive enough that you're not likely to mistake one volume for another. Altogether, a wonderful gift for your library or that of a friend.
-- Dan Ford at readingproust dot com
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